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Thursday, May 28, 2009

Curiosity (MSL) Landing Site Candidates

Check out the great post by Ken Edgett on potential landing sites for the Curiosity (it will take me awhile to get comfortable with the now official name for the Mars Science Laboratory rover) at http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00001967/

Editorial Note: These are all great sounding candidate landing sites. However, I'm uncomfortable with the process for selecting a landing site for once in a decade or two decade flagship rover. I would have preferred to send cheaper rovers to several sites to scout out the terrain and chemistry before committing a flagship class rover. I know that this puts me at odds with the planetary community. But what happens if the clays at the site selected turn out to be thin veneers created by dew? The MER rover landing capabilities were substantially enhanced to allow landing by Spirit at Gusev Crater, it it turned out not to be an ancient lake bed.

3 comments:

It would be nice if we could develop a relatively inexpensive rover that had some ability to look for Martian trace organics without being able to actually analyze them in detail like MSL. The Raman spectrometer that got kicked off the MERs at the very start of their design effort might be able to do this (especially when combined with a surface abrasion tool, such as Van recommends for rovers anyway).

About Me

You can contact me at futureplanets1@gmail.com with any questions or comments.
I have followed planetary exploration since I opened my newspaper in 1976 and saw the first photo from the surface of Mars. The challenges of conceiving and designing planetary missions has always fascinated me. I don't have any formal tie to NASA or planetary exploration (although I use data from NASA's Earth science missions in my professional work as an ecologist).
Corrections and additions always welcome.